The new report also proposed list of economic policies that could actually increase pay for women, such as paid sick and family leave and better anti-discrimination laws.
Photograph: Alamy

Almost half of the progress made toward closing the gender pay gap since 1979 is not due to women’s gains in the workplace, but to men’s wages falling and the sharp rise in overall inequality, according to a grave new report released Wednesday.

Women in the US have made lopsided advances in education, and they have entered the workforce in growing numbers and at higher-paying positions than before. But the researchers found that those strides only accounted for 60% of the reason why women’s compensation is approaching parity with men’s. The other 40% is the work of an illusion: as men’s wages are disproportionately hurt by globalization and the decline of unions, women have only appeared to catch up.

The analysis, from the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, is the first effort to quantify the impact that 25 years of wage stagnation and growing inequality have had on American women’s wages as they caught up with men’s.

The researchers found that for women, wage stagnation and the gender pay gap pack a stinging one-two punch. If women earned as much as men, and all workers’ wages kept up with the growing economy, the median hourly wage for all women would be 70% higher than it is today.

“What we’re saying is that the gender wage gap isn’t the only way that the economy shortchanges women,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and one of the study’s authors. “Getting to gender parity is important, but it doesn’t improve women’s economic prospects to the greatest possible extent.”

All workers’ pay, regardless of gender, has failed to rise with a longterm increase in worker productivity. But as a share of what wages would be, if they had kept pace with the growth of the economy, women earn even less than men. If all earnings had grown in concert with economic output, the median worker today would take home $26.04 an hour. In reality, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, that the median hourly wage for men is $18.35. For women, it’s $15.21.

Gould stressed that the gains for women have not come at the expense of men. “All the forces that have kept men’s wages down have also kept women’s down, but not to the same degree,” she said. “You don’t need men’s wages to go down in order to close the gap.” In addition to being hurt by surging globalization and declining union membership, men are more likely to be employed in shrinking or volatile sectors with lower pay, such as manufacturing and construction.”

Men also continue to out-earn women at every rung of the economic ladder and every level of education. The median wage for all women is just 83% of that of all men. And the gap is even wider at the extremes: surveys by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that black women earn 65% and Latina women earn shy of 59% of what white men are paid.

The new report is paired with a wish list of economic policies aimed at increasing pay for women, such as paid sick and family leave, stronger union rights, and better enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws. Several proposals, the Economic Policy Institute says, would help reverse the decades-long trend of stagnant wages for all workers.

Two proposals highlighted by the Economic Policy Institute – boosting the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour and eliminating tipped wages – are included in the Raise the Wage Act that Washington state senator Patty Murray introduced in late April. Across the country, 56% of minimum wage earners and two-thirds of tipped workers are women, and women of color are over-represented in both sectors. The federal minimum for tipped workers has been frozen at $2.13 since 1991, with the result that tipped workers are twice as likely to live in poverty as the rest of the population.

Another priority is prohibiting employers from making scheduling changes with little or no notice, or requiring workers to be on-call for shifts without compensation. In recent years, a number of large chains, such as William-Sonoma, Gap, and Abercrombie and Fitch, have ended or scaled back these scheduling practices. But thousands of retailers still subject workers to last-minute scheduling changes, and new research has illuminated the toll this takes on workers’ children. Fair scheduling practices are the subject of another bill, the Schedules that Work Act, that Democratic representative Rosa DeLauro introduced in 2014.

“Today, it is our outdated workplace policies that are holding working families back,” said DeLauro. “In my own view, this starts with the biggest economic challenge facing our country today, which is that too many people are simply not paid enough to live on.”